1. What is a Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse is a subject oriented, integrated, time variant, non volatile collection of data in support of management's decision making process. 2. What is Data Mart? A data mart is a subset of data warehouse that is designed for a particular line of business, such as sales, marketing, or finance. In a dependent data mart, data can be derived from an enterprise-wide data warehouse. In an independent data mart, data can be collected directly from sources. 3. Important aspects of Star Schema & Snow Flake Schema

In a star schema every dimension will have a primary key. In a star schema, a dimension table will not have any parent table. Whereas in a snow flake schema, a dimension table will have one or more parent tables. Hierarchies for the dimensions are stored in the dimensional table itself in star schema. Whereas hierarchies are broken into separate tables in snow flake schema. These hierarchies help to drill down the data from topmost hierarchies to the lowermost hierarchies.

4. A snowflake schema is a term that describes a star schema structure normalized through the use of outrigger tables. i.e dimension table hierachies are broken into simpler tables. In star schema example we had 4 dimensions like location, product, time, organization and a fact table(sales). In Snowflake schema, the example diagram shown below has 4 dimension tables, 4 lookup tables and 1 fact table. The reason is that hierarchies(category, branch, state, and month) are being broken out of the dimension tables(PRODUCT, ORGANIZATION, LOCATION, and TIME) respectively and shown separately. In OLAP, this Snowflake schema approach increases the number of joins and poor performance in retrieval of data. In few organizations, they try to normalize the dimension tables to save space. Since dimension tables hold less space, Snowflake schema approach may be avoided.

5. Measure Types

Additive - Measures that can be added across all dimensions. Non Additive - Measures that cannot be added across all dimensions. Semi Additive - Measures that can be added across few dimensions and not with others. 6. In the real world, it is possible to have a fact table that contains no measures or facts. These tables are called as Factless Fact tables. 7.